Tag: UNL

My colleague, Kayla Colgrove, shares how easy it can be to eat healthy on a budget, as well as tricks to make eating healthy easier. I like meal planning and preparing stuff for lunches on the weekends too. Which of these tips do you like?

Recently, several of my colleagues and I hosted a Sensitive Issues: Media and Communication Training, we worked on developing and improving our communication skills around agriculture and agricultural topics. One of the topics we received more information on was sustainability.

Dr. Jude Capper, a livestock sustainability consultant, was our first speaker. I want to share with some of the messages about sustainability shared by Dr. Capper.

– Sustainability is defined as “able to last or continue for a long time.” Many livestock farmers and ranchers are sustainable – whether they raise 10 head or 1,000 head. If you have never heard of the Century Farms Program, you should check it out. The American Farm Bureau Foundation recognizes farms or ranches by state that have been in a family for 100+ years! That is sustainable.

– There are essentially three things that need to be considered to be sustainable: 1) the economic viability, 2) the environmental response, and 3) the social acceptance. I think you would agree that no matter the type of agriculture system, these are all important to livestock farmers and ranchers.

– Every farmer and rancher can be sustainable! Sustainability is seen in all types of agriculture — conventional, organic, grass-fed, grain-fed, small, and large. Size of the agricultural enterprise is NOT a determinant of sustainability. Sustainability does not just apply to niche agricultural products.

– If everybody in the U.S. went meatless every Monday for an entire year… The National carbon footprint would only decrease by less than 1/3 of 1 percent!

– If animal agriculture did not exist, what would be the carbon cost of sourcing product ingredients that currently come from agricultural byproducts? Think about all of the products we use daily (i.e. cosmetics, gelatin based foods, paints, etc.), medications, and even food for our pets. Animal agriculture helps keep the carbon footprint low!

– Meat and dairy can be replaced with vegetable proteins, but humans produce methane too!

– In 1977, it took five animals to produce the same amount of beef as four animals in 2007. Raising beef has become more efficient.

– In 1977 it took 609 days to get them to a harvest (slaughter) weight, in 2007 it took 485 days. This equates to 3,045 animal days in 1977 and 1,940 animal days in 2007. Raising beef has become more sustainable, and is reducing resources.

– If we converted our current cattle feeding system entirely to a grass-fed system:

– We would need 64.6 million more cattle for a grass-fed system. These cattle average a 615 pound hot carcass weight (the weight after the animal has been harvested, hide, hooves, and intestines/variety meats removed), and it would take approximately 679 days to get them to a desirable harvest (slaughter) weight.

– In comparison, a conventional (or grain-fed beef animal) has an approximate 800 pound hot carcass weight and takes approximately 444 days to get to desirable harvest weight.

*** All cattle farming/ranching systems are needed and valued, whether it is grain-fed, grass-fed, organic, or natural — one is not better than another, they are just different.

– If, the entire beef industry converted entirely to grass-fed beef we would need an additional 131 million acres of land, 468 billion gallons of water, and 131 million tones of carbon!

– Hormones in food are considered unacceptable, but lifestyle hormones are acceptable.

– One 8 ounce steak from a non-implanted beef animal contains 3.5 ng of estrogen, from an implanted beef animal (a beef animal given additional hormones) it is 5.1 ng of estrogen. One birth control pill delivers 35,000 ng of estrogen. In comparison, a woman would have to eat 3,000 pounds of beef daily to get the same amount of hormones through meat that is found in birth control!

– Growth enhancing technologies (i.e. growth hormones) reduce the environmental impact of beef by 10.7%! More specifically, 4.2 tonnes of feed, 1 acre of land, and 22,722 gallons of water per 800 pound carcass and reduced if growth enhancement technologies are used.

– The extra beef produced as a result of using beta-agonists and implants on a single carcass with supply seven children with school lunches for an entire year!

All foods and food systems can be sustainable. Sustainability is best achieved by optimizing efficiency across the entire food and agriculture chain. Technology has allowed beef farmers/ranchers to produce more beef using less resources.

What other questions do you have about sustainability? I have also written about it here.

Jenny does a great job explaining the Engage Training and shared values messages from the conference we hosted. In the days to come I will share with you some of the information provided by Specialists on topics such as sustainability, carbon footprints, green house gas emissions, biotechnology, and more.

Many of us have been there…we’ve been asked a question in which the answer can be deemed controversial because the topic is based on emotion and beliefs. How do we respond? Do we get caught up in the emotion and passion of the issue and try to force our beliefs on others? Do we shy away or try to avoid an answer altogether by remaining silent?

Last week’s Sensitive Issues Media and Communications Training was developed to help all of us through these situations. It was a remarkable experience working with an amazing group of ladies, all passionate about food, but looking at food from a variety of perspectives and taking an issues-based approach in developing our team. Our team was comprised of a livestock expert, a manure expert, two food and nutrition experts, a communication’s expert, and myself from a crop production perspective. Special thanks to Dr. Chuck Hibberd…

The day you have been waiting for: BEES…Everything you ever wanted to know (and more)series with my colleague and friend, Natalia Bjorklund, UNL Extension Educator and PhD candidate. Natalia and I had a lot of fun getting together and filming these videos (as I am sure you will be able to tell).

Today I want to introduce Natalia to you and give you a feel for who she is. I love her passion and expertise for what she is doing and look forward to working with her again.

In the days to come I will continue to add videos about various questions such as BEE 101, bee habitat, importance of bees, concerns about bees, bees and GMOs, and more.

My colleague, Alice Henneman, a Food, Nutrition, and Health focused Educator and I started brainstorming several months ago how to combine both of our interests: agriculture and food.

In my mind it is hard to separate agriculture from food. Without agriculture there is no food (period). But obviously not everyone thinks like I do. Food doesn’t just show up in grocery stores, on plates at restaurants, or in bags as we drive away from fast food joints. We want food, but we need to want agriculture too! So to better understand the relationship and dynamics of agriculture and food we bring you a NEW website Agriculture and Food!

Alice has been instrumental in the success of the UNL Foods webpage, so she has been holding my hand during this process, since I do not naturally speak HTML codes and website lingo 🙂 But it is getting easier as the weeks go by.

Our mission: The agriculture and Food webpages are designed to help consumers understand where food comes from, how it is grown or raised, practices in place to ensure it is safe, environmental influences, and more.

We have several pages of various resources, and will continue to add to it as this project grows.

Agriculture and Food – the home page.Meat Preparation and Safety – good tips for the upcoming holiday weekend (and the other 362 days of the year too).Ag Links – looking for more information about an agricultural product? This page has it all.Social Media – other UNL folks we think provide cool content that fits our mission.Ag in Your Life – we are currently working on content for this page (big topics will be coming soon :)).

P.S. – we made all of our photo headers in PicMonkey – what do you think? (We are budget conscious, so Free-ninty-nine or close to works for us).

Meanwhile, please check out our website and let us know what you think. What are we missing? What can be elaborated on more? What do you want to know more about? We would love to know what you think!